📚 Stay up-to-date on the Book Club
Catch up on the latest Boston.com Book Club pick and join the virtual author discussions.
‘Books let us go into other worlds’: Meet Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore’s Caitlin Doggart-Bernal
Doggart-Bernal joins Boston.com's Book Club to discuss Adrienne Brodeur's eloquent "Little Monsters."
A close family bond is at the foundation of Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore, a shop that opened in Chatham nearly 20 years ago. Caitlin Doggart-Bernal and her mother, Joanne Doggart, decided to launch the business together in 2005, in part because they share a love of reading.
“We’ve always been readers,” Doggart-Bernal said. ” … We’d share books. I’d talk about what I was reading in school [in high school through adulthood], and she’d pass her book club books on to me.”
When Doggart-Bernal’s father retired and her parents moved to Cape Cod, the mother-daughter duo began to think about making the fantasy of opening a bookstore a reality.
Advertisement:
“We were both kind of like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great?’ The pieces really fell into place,” Doggart-Bernal said.
The bookstore is housed in a two-story, antique barn, and five years after they opened, they expanded to create a brightly colored Children’s Annex. The space is filled with kids’ books and toys, featuring costumes, puppets, kites, stuffed animals, and of course, shelves of reading materials to explore. The Children’s Annex is meant to evoke a feeling of enchantment, Doggart-Bernal said, and teachers who visit say that it can feel like a dream.
“Play is so enriching for children, and that’s their job — to play and learn to play,” she said. “It’s turned into a really special place. Even the decor is different. It’s a little brighter.”
The colors, she added, remind her of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle.
The Cape Cod community has been an important part of Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore’s operation and Doggart-Bernal’s life. In 2021, her youngest child became a brain tumor patient at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. When community members heard the news, they reached out with an outpouring of support: Authors offered to staff the bookstore’s desk, and customers would often ask how things were going. One children’s author connected with other writers and illustrators, who began to mail gifts.
Advertisement:
“We had stacks of signed books and drawings, little paintings from all of these talented people in the children’s [book] world,” Doggart-Bernal said. “They just would arrive on the doorstep. … The bookstore community, it makes me want to weep, when I think about how generous [it was] and how the outreach was so beautiful.”
Doggart-Bernal grew up an avid reader, and as a child, she would bring a bag of books with her to summer camp, hiding it under her bed so that no one would see how many titles she had. Today, she loves historical fiction, citing novels like “Crow Mary” by Kathleen Grissom and “The East Indian” by Brinda Charry. Part of what she enjoys about reading is the way that books can transport a person.
“Books let us go into other worlds, live other lives,” she said. “If you think about it, a unique thing about being human is the gift of [being able to inhabit] other minds and experiences, through stories, all through time.”
Adrienne Brodeur is an author who allows readers to escape into the richly developed characters she has created, in her debut novel, “Little Monsters.” Boston.com’s Book Club is featuring the work of fiction as this month’s pick, and Doggart-Bernal will have an online conversation with Brodeur on Aug. 15. The story is set on the Cape and follows a family full of secrets. An oceanographer, Adam, has raised his children, Abby and Ken, who lost their mother at a young age, in Wellfleet. While Adam is approaching his 70th birthday, Brodeur relates a Cain and Abel story, exploring the tensions between the adult siblings and their complicated relationship. At the same time, someone on the periphery of the family, Steph, enters their lives, without yet revealing her connection.
Advertisement:
Doggart-Bernal said that she found the book absorbing and layered.”I thought she nailed the family dynamics,” she said, adding, “[Brodeur] really portrayed how the family of origin dynamics reverberate into future relationships.”
She said that she admired the way the characters, who each had strikingly different perspectives, were developed, especially when Steph is introduced as an outsider.
“It helped to have her, because it gave us a more balanced view, that we could kind of gleam from the inside,” Doggart-Bernal said. “But their voices are all so distinct. That was [Brodeur’s] big talent.”
Boston.com Book Club’s virtual event with Doggart-Bernal and Brodeur about “Little Monsters” is at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 15.
Be civil. Be kind.
Read our full community guidelines.